Version-targetting in IE8

Submitted by Bevan Rudge

on

January 22, 2008

Version-targetting in IE8

4 comments

Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8 is an A List Apart article that was Slashdotted. It explains a new convention/standard designed by the Web Standards Project and Microsoft that aims to improve the support for old websites when new versions of websites come out. It introduces a new meta tag and http header that specifies what versions of each browser the page is compatible with. Such a convention would, in theory, ease the pain when IE8 is released and avoid the frantic chaos that occurred when IE7 was released. There are many different takes on it both for and against, although mostly against. I'm still undecided, but I'm interested in what others think. In any case, it sounds like microsoft has already made up their mind. My main concern is that microsoft could abuse it to revive the proprietary-tags-and-features battles of the browser wars, an important reason of why we have web standards today. Eric Meyer's timid support is worth the read.

Bevan Rudge January 24, 2008

There's a great article on Mozilla Zine (incidentally by a fellow repatriate kiwi) that got linked to from the drupal development list. I'm swaying towards this being a bad idea. However now mostly because of the reason in the following comment on slashdot and the reasons in the Mozilla Zine article.

It's a bad situation, and it's Microsoft's fault to begin with, but what solution would you propose that wouldn't inconvenience a lot of end users (both developers and their customers, alike)?

I wouldn't. I'd much rather have a little short-term inconvenience, if it means that in the long term, we can forget about all this. Maybe even forgive.

But no, we got the opposite -- something that works in the short term, but will come back to haunt us in the long term. I'm really not looking forward to the <no-really-I-mean-it-standards-compliant-this-time> tag with IE9 in another few years. Nor am I looking forward to IE15 unintentionally introducing a bug in the IE6 compatibility, breaking some decade-old site out of the blue -- I'd much rather it be broken now, when there's a greater chance someone's actually paying attention enough to fix it.

Although I'm not concerned about a <no-really-I-mean-it-standards-compliant-this-time> tag, but that the meta tag provides an excuse for not maintaining a websites and supporting websites. That negatively affects the progress and uptake of standards.

Rob Loach January 23, 2008

Great, now I can tell people running Internet Explorer to install Firefox!

Island Usurper January 23, 2008

What do you mean by "now"? ;)

greggles January 23, 2008

This is one solution, the other solution is for Microsoft to start making IE standards compliant and the "upgrade compatibility problem" goes away. It seems like IE7 headed that direction - hopefully IE8 will further (though I hear they are swapping the rendering engine - seems like a bad idea). If we have two versions of IE (7 and 8) that are "close" to standards then I think the problems will largely go away. We only have this issue when we had IE6 (broken) and IE7 (mostly not broken) I know that Firefox/Opera/Safari (or more specifically Gecko/Presto/Webkit) have their share of rendering bugs, but they are close enough to compliant they don't have these problems. I imagine that a fair amount of their problems are due to trying to properly render pages that were written for IE6 only. Also is today webstandards-wednesday after module monday and tech-tip tuesday?